The big news today is the official release of the first Android 11 beta, but that's not all that Google has been working on. Today, the company also revealed a few updates for developers to get excited, like features coming to the Android Studio IDE and an overhauled Play Console.

First off, Android Studio 4.1 has now graduated to beta status, and 4.2 has entered the Canary channel. Both versions have support for wireless ADB debugging on Android 11, model importing for ML Kit and TensorFlow Lite, faster app deployment to Android 11 devices, native memory profiling, an overhauled System Trace tool, and an updated performance profiler UI.

Google also says the device emulator in Android Studio is now more tightly integrated with the IDE. "Tests now run side-by-side so you can see results from multiple devices at the same time," the blog post said, "and we’ve improved the device manager to more easily handle your devices."

Another key improvement in the Android Studio updates is full support for version 1.4 of the Kotlin language, which is still technically in preview. "Kotlin 1.4 provides faster code completion, more powerful type inference enabled by default, function interfaces, as well as helpful quality of life improvements like mixing named and positioning arguments," the announcement said. Google is also reporting that over 70% of the top 1,000 apps on the Play Store are using Kotlin to some extent.

Beyond the Android Studio announcements, Google is also starting to roll out a redesigned Play Console — the web interface that developers use to publish and maintain their apps on the Play Store. The new Console doesn't appear to be live for me yet, but Google says it helps developers better understand device features, improves guidance on policy changes and user feedback, and has new acquisition reports. There are also new user management options, for teams with multiple developers that need to access Play Console.

Source: Google Developers